![]() As their bodies fall apart, they’re not bumbling about the ruined world or trying to kill you. The fevered victims of Ling Ma’s astounding debut novel aren’t exactly zombies. But then again, the end of everything rarely plays nice. In both the level of detail and its thematic weight, this is a monumentally unnerving novel, one that leaves no easy answers or comfortable nooks in which to take refuge. ![]() In cursing memory, it inevitably conjures memory. ![]() ![]() on a larger level, these evocations of the recent past serve another narrative function: they make the reader complicit in the very act that this novel warns against. Severance allows for some slightly altered versions of recent events to take place. While Shen Fever seems as plausible as any devastating epidemic in fiction, it also hits with a greater metaphorical resonance. much of Severance’s power arrives through this: the sense that something terrible and seismic might happen, and no one would even notice. It also features one of the most hauntingly plausible end-of-the-world scenarios I’ve encountered in recent fiction, one which folds in enough hints of the real to be particularly unsettling. It’s a novel that sneaks up on you from all sides: it’s an affecting portrayal of loss, a precise fictional evocation of group dynamics, and a sharp character study of its protagonist, Candace Chen. ![]()
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